294: ON SENSATION AND THE UNITY OP 



" Inquiry," of seventeen years' later date.* Even 

 Sir William Hamilton, learned historian and 

 acute critic as he was, not only failed to appre- 

 hend the philosophical bearing of long-established 

 physiological truths; but, when he affirmed that 

 there is no reason to deny that the mind feels at 

 the finger points, and none to assert that the 

 brain is the sole organ of thought,! he showed 

 that he had not apprehended the significance of 

 the revolution commenced, two hundred years 

 before his time, by Descartes, and effectively 

 followed up by Haller, Hartley, and Bonnet, in 

 the middle of the last century. 



* In justice to Reid, however, it should be stated that the 

 chapters on sensation in the Essays on the Intellectual Powers 

 (1785) exhibit a great improvement. He is, in fact, in ad- 

 vance of his commentator, as the note to Essay II. chap. ii. 

 p. 248 of Hamilton's edition shows. 



f Haller, amplifying Descartes, writes in the Primes, Lincw, 

 CCCLXVI. " Non est adeo obscurum sensum omnem oriri ab 

 objecti sensibilis impressione in nervum quemcumqne cor- 

 poris humani, et earndem per eum nervum ad cerebrum per- 

 venientem tune demum representari animse, quando cere- 

 brum adtigit. Ut etiam hoc falsum sit anirnam inproximo 

 per sensoria nervorumque rarnos sentire." . . . DLVII. 

 " Dum ergo sentimus quinque diversissima entia conjun- 

 guntur : corpus quod sentimus : organi sensorii adfectio ab 

 eo corpore : cerebri adfectio a sensorii percussione nata : in 

 anima nata mutatio : animas denique conscientia et sensa- 

 tionis adperceptio." Nevertheless, Sir William Hamilton 

 gravely informs his hearers : " We have no more right to 

 deny that the mind feels at the finger points, as conscious- 

 ness assures us, than to assert that it thinks exclusively in 

 the brain." Lecture on Metaphysics and Logic, ii. p. 128. 

 " We have no reason whatever to doubt the report of con- 

 sciousness, that we actually perceive at the external point 

 of sensation, and that we perceive the material reality." 

 Ibid. p. 129. 



